Tag: Change Management

During a sprint, many Scrum teams focus on action items, story points, ceremonies, and sprint length. They often overlook the importance of the sprint itself to the team’s potential productivity.

Sprints are relevant to performance because a team’s effectiveness evolves over time, and a sprint is a block of time—each usually 1 to 4 weeks in duration. With each sprint, team members participate in Scrum ceremonies and deliver work together. The ceremonies alone don’t turn a group of strangers into a team, but they can serve as shared experiences that help members feel more and more comfortable with each other.

Let me know if this sounds familiar: You talk about empowerment with your staff, at skip levels, and at town hall meetings. It’s a concept you reinforce over and over again within your organization. And yet you still observe teams asking for permission in situations where you want them to make decisions and drive actions. You still find yourself as the bottleneck, giving tactical approvals on topics you don’t feel require your input.

There’s a good chance you’re the reason a culture of empowerment hasn’t taken hold.

When I was a Girl Scout, I learned how to succeed in organization-wide digital transformations. (Everyone got that IT leadership badge, right?!)

We were taught to:

Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver and the other’s gold.

This universal advice applies now as we “scout” in the digital age. It’s important to value the old strategies for success—the fundamentals that kept your organization alive before its digital transformation—while seeking out new ones to apply in the current industry climate.

For the CIOs’ Perspectives on Digital Transformation study, IT leaders from a wide range of industries and organization sizes were asked about the nature of their ongoing digital transformations, progress along their journeys, challenges, and more. Based on their responses and our experience with clients, we have drawn the following conclusions about the state of digital transformations in 2018.

As with most significant changes, digital transformation can elicit both passive and aggressive reactions. In the correct context and with the right audience, both perspectives can be valid and useful. How can IT leaders embrace these representations to enact true transformation within an organization? (more…)

While IT implementation challenges may seem similar across industries, it often takes a deeper dive into a profession’s nuances and specific constraints to fully understand potential barriers to success. I was reminded of this recently at home during dinner. (more…)

An Agile transformation is a journey. A journey has many ups and downs, and an Agile journey is no different. Another way of thinking about this is how a company can reach Agile maturity. Just like playing an instrument or participating in a sport, practice makes perfect. However, that is not the full story.

A Center of Excellence—such as an OSM (Office of Strategy Management), PMO (Project Management Office), IT Governance, Continuous Improvement, or similar task force—is usually established to achieve one or more of the following core objectives within an organization:

Leadership requires taking risks. But technology must work reliably. How do IT leaders square these two realities?

CIOs are driving organizational strategies now more than ever. The more a CIO’s success is tied to business outcomes, the more risk they assume. Traditionally, CIOs have been responsible for KPIs like uptime and system availability to support internal productivity and operational efficiency. But suddenly—now that all industries are becoming digital—there is much more at stake.

Organizations generally strive for optimization of internal processes and for the most efficient use of resources, since some methods are better than others. The most effective way to solve a specific problem is commonly referred to as a “best practice,” yet the term is often misused and misunderstood. Management consultants are often referred to as peddlers of best practices, applying a one-size-fits-all solution to any given problem.

Let’s clarify what best practices are and are not, and how to benefit from them.

Why Abraic?

Our track record is unbeatable. Over 90% of our clients ask us to come back for additional projects. We have a 100% referenceable customer list, and are told by CIOs that Abraic is their “trusted advisor.”